Stream Computations Organized for Reconfigurable Execution (SCORE): Introduction and Tutorial

A primary impediment to wide-spread exploitation of reconfigurable computing is the lack of a unifying computational model which allows application portability and longevity without sacrificing a substantial fraction of the raw capabilities. We introduce SCORE (Stream Computation Organized for Reconfigurable Execution), a streambased compute model which virtualizes reconfigurable computing resources (compute, storage, and communication) by dividing a computation up into fixed-size “pages” and time-multiplexing the virtual pages on available physical hardware. Consequently, SCORE applications can scale up or down automatically to exploit a wide range of hardware sizes. We hypothesize that the SCORE model will ease development and deployment of reconfigurable applications and expand the range of applications which can benefit from reconfigurable execution. Further, we believe that a well engineered SCORE implementation can be efficient, wasting little of the capabilities of the raw hardware. In this paper, we introduce the key components of the SCORE system.